We interviewed him and talked about how the SimScale community is helping him with his research.

You’ve been an active member in the SimScale community since it was launched last December. How did you find out about SimScale?

I found out about SimScale in a CFD group on LinkedIn to be precise. I tried to use it last summer, but it seemed to be too difficult for me at that time. Later I successfully started again with the help of tutorial videos and workshops for beginners. Since then I have been actively using SimScale.

What projects are you currently working on?

Recently I have finished a heat exchanger simulation with a filter element. It is basically a big cylinder with an inlet tube inserted into it and outlet tube at the top. The filter element is located at the upper part of the heat exchanger. The flow inside the domain is being cooled down from the outside. The main difficulty in this heat exchanger simulation for me was taking into account strong buoyancy effects which creates a downstream flow near the walls of the domain. while the main flow goes up. Another difficult part was creating a robust mesh, but the SimScale interface allows creating several meshes within one project, and this made it easier.

Did you get good results from the heat exchanger simulation?

I am really satisfied with the results that I’ve gotten. And in this regard I should mention that SimScale has a nice option built in to control results by tracking values of different fields while a computation is running. It’s a bit tricky to implement such a thing on your local PC.

You participated in the Go with the Flow Challenge and were the 2nd place winner. First of all congratulations on that! What made you decide to enter the challenge? Did you face any difficulties?

Thank you so much! The main motivation for me was to perform a simple simulation of forced convection buoyant flow as a SimScale example case, since there was just one case of this kind and it is pretty sophisticated. The post-processing was a bit tricky, but apart from this there were no problems.

Which features of SimScale do you like the most?

I love the opportunity SimScale gives in managing my projects – I have all my geometries, meshes, simulation runs and even post-processing in one project. And I get to use it from any local PC available for me at the moment. Also automatic meshing with snappyhex mesher is pretty nice. Controlling results on the go, as I mentioned, is quite good as well.

What features would you like to see improved or added to the platform?

I am looking for more turbulence models and numerical schemes available in the case set up. It also would be nice to have a Surface mode in the viewer set up by default, since it takes a lot of time and resources to load a case with relatively big mesh on a slow PC. Finally it would be great to have a results control feature for uploaded OpenFOAM cases (when they have necessary configuration files in them, of course).

What is your favorite project in the SimScale Project Library?

My favorite one is the Light Bulb by Ali Arafat, because of the sophisticated setup and complex mesh refinement.

What projects are you planning to work on in the future?

I am planning to work with two phase flow simulations. It takes a lot of long runs with different set ups, so SimScale would be very helpful to me. Even though SimScale doesn’t support two-Phase-Euler-Foam solver natively, I will be able to continue the simulation by uploading OpenFOAM case.

Thanks for talking to us, Eugeny. We are happy to hear that the SimScale Community is helping worldwide academic users with learning and practicing numerical analysis.

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Sijia Ma

Sijia is working as Business Developer at SimScale. She helps CAE engineers understand the trends of cloud-based solutions.